Caring for the ephemera in your collections
March 1, 2007
Does your family archive include ticket stubs, programs, licenses or calling cards? Whether they were forgotten in the pages of a book or carefully pasted into a scrapbook, these items are what we call ephemera.
The glossary by the Society of American Archivists defines ephemera as “materials, usually printed documents, created for a specific, limited purpose, and generally designed to be discarded after use.”
Marty Weil runs ephemera.com. It’s full of fascinating paper treasures and heavily illustrated with color scans. Very “visually appealing” as we used to say in the children’s publishing biz. Basically, this guy is an ephemera guru. So you can imagine how excited I was when he invited me to offer storage and handling tips to his many readers. In hindsight, I might have been a little too excited, because I rambled on so much Marty had to publish it as a two-parter.
Part 1: Protecting Your Paper Collectibles
Part 2: Storing Your Ephemera
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